13 de Noviembre 2006

News Roundup: Armchair Archaeology, GPSNavX, Automator

Armchair Archaeology - my friend Scott Madry here in the Raleigh, NC area has made international news again for his use of Google Earth to discover archaeological sites. You can read the story at the National Geographic News site. He has been researching mostly areas in France using GE's satellite photos and has discovered Roman villas, ancient roads, religious sites, and more. He showed me a few of the sites, but unfortunately they aren't releasing the locations to the public until scientists have a chance to research them before "grave diggers" go after them.

GPSNavX - Stefan at OgleEarth has reviewed this Mac-based product for mariners which is an online route planner, navigation software, and charplotter for sailors. The interesting thing is that it appears to be the first of the major nav software vendors to support Google Earth. You can both show your routes and tracks in GE, and you can upload waypoints and other information from GE to the nav software. I'm definitely going to have to keep this one in mind for when I next go on a sailing venture. See a picture of the GE features in a screenshot here.

Automator for Google Earth - This tool is for Mac OS X only. It is a set of scripts allowing you to perform tasks "automatically" by using scripts to perform a series of actions. It's a beta project which you can download from the link above. Stefan mentions this one as well (since he's a big Mac user).

I'm going to be installing a new desktop over the course of the next few days. It should be fun to get back into the top 10% of performance for a brief while. My graphics performance should jump quite a bit since my current card is 3 years old (although it was the top when I bought it).

Comentarios

mentions that scientists are using GE to locate landforms that display evidence of massive tsunamis created by large meteorite collisions. The tsunamis are sufficiently powerful to dramatically affect coastal landforms. If the identified landforms are indeed created by tsunamis it would suggest that significant meteorite collisions occur more frequently than previously thought.

I have searched the GE BB for files highlighting these landforms but I haven't found any or any reference to this article. Do you know of any such files?